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Reps Leads Meetup Summary

The Mozilla Reps Council and module Peers met for 2 days over this weekend to solidify plans for 2014 and re-calibrate the vision and goals of Reps in general to align with our ambitious organisational goals around growing community. Traditionally billed as Council meetings, these bi-yearly sessions are designed to get the project leaders together to work on planning and strategy for the program. The program has made a huge impact, but to ensure continued impact we have to continually assess the program to make improvements and work on future strategy. The Council provides the general vision of the program and oversees day-to-day operations globally. The Peers oversee the Council and provide input and vision on the program in general. Also at the meeting were guests William Reynolds (Community Tools, including reps.mozilla.org), Konstantina Papadea (Budget and Swag), Michelle Thorne (Foundation), Marcia Knous (QA), and Rosana Ardila (SUMO).

2014

Our 2014 goal is simple:

Mozilla Reps in 2014 are more engaged, empowered and enabled.

What Happened?

ReMo Art by Rosana (Photo credit: King Molan)

We started day one with a question to attendees to frame the weekend:

How can we improve the Reps program to better enable Mozilla Communities that have impact?

This was the measure for everything we would do for the rest of the time. The two primary topic areas on day one were program structure / goals, and leadership. We broke into sub-groups with the remit of coming up with the bottlenecks and problems in these areas. Solutions were for other sessions. In calling out what we felt were important issues, we could provide focus for the rest of the weekend. We grouped items into three different categories that we felt caught all we wanted to capture – Council and Peers, Mentors, Reps.

Mixed through day one were other sessions. Prefaced by Michelle talking about Teach The Web/Webmaker plans for the year and how Reps can support, we had a general discussion about events. With an average of 3 daily globally, events are central to the program, and will continue to evolve to meet the needs of everyone at Mozilla. Tristan Nitot came in to talk about TRIBE and personal development. Kate Naszradi dialed in really early California time to give us an update on the fast growing Firefox Student Ambassadors Program. Then Mary Colvig and David Boswell to discuss the topic ‘Enable Communities that have Impact’, aka One Million Mozillians. How we are going to scale by 10x in 2014. To round out the day we did a recap and there were mixed feelings on what we achieved, which fed into a new framework for day two.

For day two, we basically threw out the written schedule, and decided to hack. There was a hunger for finding solutions to the issues we identified on day one and starting to fix them. Out of the breakouts we had came a Trello board with specific tasks.

Issues with Mentors Scaling (photo by henx on Flickr)

Also on day two: Pete Scanlon dropped in for a discussion on Engagement, the team’s role in 2014 Mozilla goals, and how Reps fit in and can make an impact. We had a few more discussions on important topics that bubbled up such as the Reps application process. We collaborated. We argued. We laughed.

Discussion with Pete Scanlon

Huge thanks to Henrik Mitsch who did a fantastic job as facilitator over the weekend. Without him it would have been chaos!

Tasks

Here are some of the important topics that surfaced:

Program Purpose

Visibility of Council

Council Accountability

Council On-boarding

Council and Budget

Leadership

Mentors Scaling

Mentors Training

Reps Portal

Reps Activity

For these and other buckets, we brainstormed solutions and then broke them down to tasks. For sure, there is a lot of work to do, but it can be done. One of the challenges coming out of previous ReMo work events was implemention of work items. There were various reasons for this, and we are coming up with new work models to fix this. Primarily tasked are the folks at the meeting but we will be looking to mentors and all Reps for help.

What Next?

The program purpose is clear and articulated on the wiki, but the scope and mechanisms for working with us have perhaps not been clear. We will fix that, to make it more accessible. Thanks to Michelle for writing a great case-study of Webmaker working with Reps. After we prioritise tasks, we’ll be sharing out with everyone for feedback. We all have a stake in Mozilla Reps.

Group Picture (by marcia@mozilla on Flickr)

We can help your team, your community, you. We’ll be telling you how. But this is a two-way street. Tell us how we can support you.

Very soon I will have some more exciting Reps news for you. Watch this space.